STEVE KELMAN is professor of public
management at Harvard University s
Kennedy School of Government and
former administrator of the Of ce of
Federal Procurement Policy.
Commentary | STEVE KELMAN
During a recent trip to New Zea-
land, I had a chance to meet with
the leader of that country s civil
service and with human resources
of cials from several ministries.
We had a wide-ranging conversa-
tion, but two snippets of it caught
my attention more than anything
on our of cial agenda.
In the course of our discussion,
I discovered that neither "retired
in place" nor "turkey farm" has an
equivalent term in New Zealand s
public sector. Indeed, there were
some chuckles from the of cials
when I explained what those
phrases meant.
For those unfamiliar with that
federal jargon, "retired in place"
refers to a longtime employee
who has psychologically tuned out
and is doing the bare minimum
at work while waiting for retire-
ment. A "turkey farm" is a small
of ce where managers park all the
incompetent employees they can t
get rid of because of civil service
protections, creating a separate
non-producing unit to prevent
the turkeys from interfering with
and demoralizing the productive
employees.
When I discussed turkey farms,
one of the New Zealand managers
declared, "We re too shorthanded
to be able to afford having some-
thing like that."
I m not sure we are so over-
staffed at U.S. agencies that we
can afford it either, frankly, but the
manager s response does raise an
important question: How has New
Zealand avoided these problems in
their government workforce?
Any answer is speculative
because we only have what social
scientists call "an N of 1" --- i.e.,
only one case with which to con-
trast ourselves and a wide range of
potential explanations. But let me
speculate.
One difference between the
United States and New Zealand
is that for the past 20 years or so,
New Zealand has had a govern-
ment human resources system
that is similar to what exists in the
country s private sector. As I under-
stand it, government organizations
are given a considerable amount of
freedom to craft hiring procedures
that they nd appropriate to the
kinds of people they need to hire,
and the rules for dismissing poorly
performing employees are similar
to those in the private sector. Even
so, New Zealand s rules offer great-
er protections for workers than do
those in the U.S. private sector.
A second difference is that gov-
ernment service in New Zealand is
still held in relatively high regard
and is competitive in attracting
talented young people. That com-
petitiveness is undoubtedly made
easier by New Zealand s lack of a
major nance sector, which in the
United States distorts the entire
labor market with its outsized
salaries.
The second problem is hard for
us in the United States to do much
about, but the rst is self-in icted.
I support U.S. public employee
unions in trying to call attention to
the contributions and raise the sta-
tus of public employees, but their
conservatism in opposing modern-
ization of our civil service system
is destructive and, in the long run,
self-destructive.
To be sure, these U.S. expres-
sions re ect an aspiration for
government performance that
hardly even exists in many coun-
tries. There are plenty of places
with parasitic government organi-
zations staffed by employees who
are living high on bloated salaries
and corruption, where everyone
behaves at best according to the
U.S. concept of retired in place and
every of ce is a turkey farm.
At least we expect better, recog-
nize that not everybody is like that
and enjoy a culture where those
phrases re ect derision. That s a
good start. But we can and should
do better. ■
Learning from New Zealand's public sector
A highly regarded civil service and a exible hiring system could account
for the country s lack of turkey farms
New Zealand has a
government human
resources system that
is similar to what
exists in the country's
private sector.
March 15, 2014 FCW.COM
11